Lordly in that citadel
19.1. Seventy-Thirty Jill Talcott
When Jill awoke, Nate was gone. She could hardly believe it. She looked around outside the apartment, even outside the building, to confirm. Why would he go anywhere without her? That wasn’t very smart. Now she had to sit around and wait for him to get back.
Her doubts of the night before had vanished. She was ready to work again, thought it would do them good—do him good—if they could get a fresh start on the day, make some progress, keep their minds occupied. She tried to study the pile of printouts from the spaceport, but her mind kept wandering, listening for the sounds of his return.
When he came in an hour or so later, he said he’d gone for a walk, hadn’t slept well. His answers were clipped and stiff. Jill was determined to be patient.
“Nate, please don’t go off on your own like that, not without telling me.”
“You know what?” Nate flashed an icy smile. “You’re not my mother, or even my boss for that matter, not here.”
Jill stared at him in dismay. “What is the matter with you?”
“I know you were awake last night. I mean, how stupid do you think I am?”
Jill was embarrassed. The snore had, perhaps, been overdoing it. “I’m—I’m sorry. I just…”
“Whatever.” He began folding his blanket in quick jerks.
“What are you doing?”
He didn’t answer.
“Nate, please. I do… I do care about you. It’s just that at this moment I think we should stay focused on what’s important here.”
“You know what? When you say ‘we should stay focused on what’s important’ what you’re really saying is ‘this is what I choose to deal with.’ That way, you can sweep everything you can’t handle—all that ‘unimportant stuff,’ like emotions, and love, and your humanity—under the rug. You know what that leaves you with?”
She blinked at him, speechless.
“It leaves you with a very fat rug!”
Jill was at a loss. She had never seen him like this. His face was harsh with anger and pain. His words were not half as bad as that look on his face.
“Nate… I—”
“Forget it. You do what you want. I’m done with it.” He stalked out, leaving her alone.
Jill ran to the door of the building and called after him, told him he was being childish, told him he couldn’t go off on his own. God only knew what all she said, but she didn’t say the right thing. Nate disappeared around a corner, never even turning around.
Jill waited at the apartment for several hours. It was a stressful situation, she told herself. It would be for anyone. She tended to forget that Nate had a very large Greek family, friends. He might never see any of them again. Of course he’d be grieving about that.
She tried to understand, to imagine what he was feeling, but it was hard. The truth was, this place did not feel all that bad to her. She rather liked the quietness of it, the feeling of owning the City that its desertion allowed her to have. And there was that sense she’d had from the start of something familiar. She didn’t miss all those things Nate missed—TV, radio, even food. Not really, not when she had her work, the potential of the alien technology laid out in front of her. It was about as thrilling an opportunity as any scientist could imagine.
And she wasn’t leaving anyone behind. If there was one person in her old life she would have missed, it was Nate, and he was here. Nate was here.
And if Nate were not here? Would she like being here then? No, she would not be nearly so okay with this if Nate were not here.
Still, whatever pressure he was under, he was being outrageously unprofessional and irresponsible by going off like that. Something might happen to him out there on his own. How would he get back? How would she know? Would he even come back?
Of course he would come back. Of course he would.
The printouts were on her lap. She tried to pull her mind back to them and could not. She sighed. How much time this was all taking! They should be getting work done, not wasting time arguing. But the only thing she could think about at the moment was, How could she get him to forgive her? How could she make it okay?
If they couldn’t get off the planet it only made sense to allow her relationship with Nate to… to develop. He had needs, even here apparently, even on a seventy-thirty world. At the very least he had emotional needs. She should be more sympathetic. For the sake of the mission, if nothing else.
The flat, featureless cubicle of a room was dead, so amazingly empty. Jill had never heard a quiet this deep. She suddenly realized that since Nate had sprung her from the hospital she’d been with him every second. How many hours had that been? Seventy-two? Longer than that. Well over a hundred. At least a week since she’d not known where he was, since he had not been within earshot, if not right beside her.
She did desire him; that was not the issue. It was… what? Her, her own body, her own self. She was afraid of… of not being attractive enough, of being foolish in her intimacy, of being absurd. How could she bear that? Better not to let him get close at all.
And she finally saw that for what it was: a very old defense mechanism. When, she wondered, had she decided she was unlovable? Decided rejection was so inevitable it was better not to try?
“This is ridiculous,” she said, standing up. When Nate deigned to return they could discuss it like rational human beings. She was willing to… to make concessions, even if the mere thought turned her to jelly. Yes. Okay. Yes. Fine!
Until then, she was going to go see those damned antennae!
The walk took several hours. The round dome was smaller than that of the spaceport, but it had the same thick walls. There was the suction sound of a breaking seal as she tugged the doors open. Inside, endless branching corridors were labeled at the top in numbers, probably coordinates. The individual rooms were comprised of enormous panels in rows like bookshelves, panels with millions of tiny light indicators, most of them dark. This was the City’s power grid.
The place was empty. She thought about searching for the grid’s control room, to try to learn more about their power source, but she didn’t want to spend hours in here, not alone. Besides, what had really drawn her was the antennae. She left the building to check out the field next door.
The antenna field was on the power plant’s western side. It was the coolest time of day. The larger sun was setting and the smaller was still too low in the sky to broach the skyline. She explored the field in the shadows. It was one vast plain, ten or twelve of the City blocks long and almost as wide. It was also ancient—much, much older than the power planet itself. The antennae rose only about twelve feet from the ground, and up close she realized she was seeing just the tops of them. Most of their bulk had been buried. And not, she was pretty sure, because the ground had been purposefully filled in: they’d been covered by the drifting sands of the planet; they’d been covered by time. Their metal tubing, like the ship she and Nate had seen on the spaceport runway, had fossilized, coated with red dust that had baked hard, layer after layer. Even thin wires jutting from the tops of the antennae had this coating. They looked like lacquered Chinese chopsticks.
Jill fingered them, as if she could tell time by the density of the layers. Old. How old? She had no idea. But she had the feeling it was like finding ancient pyramids in the middle of a modern city.
This place was a riddle, but it was not what she’d been hoping for. If this civilization was manipulating the wave, this kind of antenna field might be how they would do it. Had they used this technology long ago? Had they since developed subtler ways of influencing the wave? If so, why hadn’t they torn all this down?